Mark Pesce & Dr. Genevieve Bell have co-written a four episode podcast series – “1968: When the World Began” – exploring transformations that completely rewrote the relationship between ourselves and our machines.

On the 9th of December in 1968, Douglas Engelbart gave the ‘Mother of All Demos‘ – the most important hour in the history of computing, one that drew back the curtain on the world we all live in today.

Engelbart’s demo was the culmination of a wave of change that crested in 1968.

“1968: When the World Began” looks at the confluence of art, interactivity and intelligence augmentation that played out against the most chaotic year of the 20th century.

NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen opens a window onto a world where the next billion seconds of journalism grows from a foundation of trust and relationships.

Jay writes and teaches extensively on journalism and it’s future. Here’s an essay “Optimising Journalism for Trust” about the Dutch publication De Correspondent that Jay refers to in our interview as one future for journalism.

We’re living in a time of vaporised media – and we got here suddenly, with no preparation, or any clear plan on how to make this work for us.

How do we stay well informed as news organisations find their dollars taken instead by search engine giants Google and Facebook?

Rob talks about “the Gerasimov Doctrine” – using the collapse in the media to wage a sort of covert war against a government – and here’s an article Rob recommends in this episode, exploring that whole topic.

Also highly recommended is the Peter Pomerantsev book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, about how this has become the new reality for Putin’s Russia. Read more in this article from The Guardian.

In our world, you flip a coin and it comes up either heads or tails. But in the spooky quantum world – that’s everything from a single atom all the way up to a small virus – that coin can come up both heads _and_ tails, depending on how you read it. So which is it? Heads? Tails? Both? Neither?

One of the experimental setups used to read qbits

Welcome to the strange world of quantum computing where this both-true-and-false ‘superposition’ allows quantum computers to vastly outperform their ‘classical’ peers (such as the one in your smartphone).

And since you’re going to need a quantum computer to run this program, here’s the IBM Q Quantum Experience (5 qubit device available publicly on the cloud) – a REAL quantum computer you can run your own experiments on!

Back in July 2016, Pokémon Go opened the doors to the brave new world of augmented reality – an overnight success fifty years in the making. With companies like Magic Leap and Facebook working hard to create augmented reality ‘spectacles’, the next billion seconds will see us put our smartphones down — instead placing the screen over our eyes. We’ll like what we see in our new, “improved” reality – but who’s creating and controlling that reality? That’s a question confronting all of us at the dawn of “The Last Days of Reality”.

Why is it so hard to tear ourselves away from Facebook’s feed? What is it feeding us that makes it so addictive?

The power of artificial intelligence combined with the eternal surveillance of the smartphone made a monster out of Zuck’s social network – but has it divided us more than it united us? How are people using this social network to spread fake news? How is fake news being weaponised to change the way we vote?

All of these questions – and much more – are answered in our special two-part episode, “The Last Days of Reality”.

Part one tells the tale of how we ended up where we are – addicted to Facebook and in the thrall of shadowy firms like Cambridge Analytica. Here’s a taste:

Like artificial intelligence, virtual reality is one of those twenty-year ‘overnight success’ stories. For longer than that, VR pioneer Tony Parisi has been probing the boundaries of computer graphics, interactivity and illusion to create the next generation of technologies that immerse us in experiences of new worlds.

Tony tells us why VR has finally come of age – and what’s coming next, as ‘augmented reality’ integrates ‘consensual hallucinations’ into our daily lives – influencing everything from entertainment to business to the design of our kitchens:

The show opens with a nod to Beyonce’s amazing performance at Coachella 2018 – which featured the largest livestream audience in history, nearly half a million viewers:

There’s a new technology – videogrammetry – that allows full performance capture in 3D. Videogrammetry was used to create a video by former Smashing Pumpkin’s frontman Billy Corigan, with amazing VR landscapes created by Tilt Brush virtuoso Danny Bitman (@DannyBittman on Twitter):

The ‘Next Big Thing’ always promises to be the cure for all our ails – but inevitably the high promises tarnish and all our best efforts fall back to earth. For as long as we’ve had technology, we’ve believed in its capacity to craft a perfect world – even though we ourselves are far from perfect.

Author and philosopher Erik Davis has spent twenty years dissecting our attitudes toward technology, utopia and belief – and writes about a future where we ‘wise up’ enough to understand the human value of our imperfections.

Here’s a bit of a taste of our wide-ranging conversation about faith, reason, utopia, and why we seem to make the same mistakes over and over again…

All the way back in 1994, Bill Gates quipped, “Banking is necessary – banks are not.” For billions of ‘unbanked’ in the developing world, banking happens through a smartphone app – no branches, no tellers, and no ATMs. How does a bank inspire trust – or trust its customers – when it’s all inside a smartphone?

Banking futurist Andrew Davis shares his vision of a future where banks protect privacy as well as your money, a world where everyone, everywhere becomes a banker.

Andrew Davis chats with Mark Pesce (photo: Dee Halwala)

Here’s a clip of Andrew talking about ‘open banking’ – the coming revolution where banking becomes about your data just as much as today it’s about your money:

One of the most interesting innovations in banking involves the analysis of mobile usage to measure the creditworthiness of an individual or business. This article from the World Bank explains how it works.

The Next Billion Seconds

We live in a world where every day brings dramatic changes. The world is growing smarter – not just us, but everything we touch. That’s changing what we can do – and it’s changing the shape of the future.

The coming ‘next billion seconds’ are the most important in human history, as technology transforms the way we live and work. We talk to some of the brightest minds shaping our world, charting our path as we voyage into an incredible future.